Best Dagny Taggart Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“She stopped for the duration of a glance around her, as if to recapture the place, but there was no recognition of persons in her eyes, the glance merely swept through the room, as if making a swift inventory of physical objects.”

Indifference Atlas Shrugged Dagny Taggart

Book:Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“Incredulity and indifference were her only reaction: incredulity, because she could not conceive of what would bring human beings to such a state —indifference, because she could not regard those who reached it, as human any longer.”

Human Indifference Atlas Shrugged Dagny Taggart

Book:Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“Isn’t it wonderful that our bodies can give us so much pleasure?” he said to her once, quite simply. They were happy and radiantly innocent. They were both incapable of the conception that joy is sin.”

Joy Pleasure Atlas Shrugged Dagny Taggart Francisco D Anconia

Book:Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“...she stood beside him, sagging in his arms, abandoning herself to anything he wished, in open acknowledgment of his power to reduce her to helplessness by the pleasure he had the power to give her.”

Pleasure Atlas Shrugged Dagny Taggart

Book:Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around?” “Darling, what do you mean?” “There wasn’t a person there who enjoyed it,” she said, her voice lifeless, “or who thought or felt anything at all. They moved about, and they said the same dull things they say anywhere. I suppose they thought the lights would make it brilliant.” “Darling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is simply supposed to be gay.” “How? By being stupid?”

Gay Romantic Atlas Shrugged Dagny Taggart

Book:Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“She heard the words; she understood the meaning; she was unable to make it real—to grant the respect of anger, concern, opposition to a nightmare piece of insanity that rested on nothing but people’s willingness to pretend to believe that it was sane.”

People Atlas Shrugged Dagny Taggart

Book:Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“The capacity for unclouded enjoyment, she thought, does not belong to irresponsible fools; an inviolate peace of spirit is not the achievement of a drifter; to be able to laugh like that is the end result of the most profound, most solemn thinking.”

Laugh Atlas Shrugged Dagny Taggart Francisco D Anconia

Book:Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“Well, whose opinion did you take?” “I don’t ask for opinions.” “What do you go by?” “Judgment.” “Well, whose judgment did you take?” “Mine.” “But whom did you consult about it?” “Nobody.”

Opinion Judgment Atlas Shrugged Dagny Taggart

Book:Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“She survived it. She was able to survive it, because she did not believe in suffering. She faced with astonished indignation the ugly fact of feeling pain, and refused to let it matter. Suffering was a senseless accident, it was not part of life as she saw it.”

Pain Suffering Atlas Shrugged Dagny Taggart

Book:Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“They said you were hard and cold and unfeeling.” “But it’s true...I am, in the sense they mean—only have they ever told you in just what sense they mean it?" "What did they mean about you?” “Whenever anyone accuses some person of being ‘unfeeling,’ he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that .‘to feel’ is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality.”

Reason Cold Emotions Feel Atlas Shrugged Unemotional Dagny Taggart

Book:Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“When the train stopped, when she got off and heard the concrete of the platform under her heels, she felt light, lifted, impelled to action. She started off, walking fast, as if the speed of her steps could give form to the things she felt.”

Action Speed Atlas Shrugged Dagny Taggart

Book:Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“...were she lying crushed under the ruins of a building, were she torn by the bomb of an air raid, so long as she was still in existence she would know that action is man’s foremost obligation, regardless of anything he feels...”

Action Atlas Shrugged Dagny Taggart

Book:Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“...do you think any of these people are enjoying it? They’re just straining to be more senseless and aimless than usual. To be light and unimportant . . . You know, I think that only if one feels immensely important can one feel truly light.”

Important Atlas Shrugged Dagny Taggart

Book:Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“Dagny leaned back in her chair. The short sentence was a shock. It was not merely relief: it was the sudden realization that nothing else was necessary to guarantee that it would be done; she needed no proofs, no questions, no explanations; a complex problem could rest safely on three syllables pronounced by a man who knew what he was saying.”

Trust Confidence Reliability Atlas Shrugged Dagny Taggart Hank Rearden

Book:Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“It seemed natural; natural to the moment’s peculiar reality that was sharply clear, but cut off from everything, immediate, but disconnected, like a bright island in a wall of fog, the heightened, unquestioning reality one feels when one is drunk.”

Reality Atlas Shrugged Dagny Taggart

Book:Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“She felt a bored indifference toward the immediate world around her...She took it as a regrettable accident, to be borne patiently for a while, that she happened to be imprisoned among people who were dull.”

People Boring Indifference Dull Atlas Shrugged Dagny Taggart

Book:Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged